KVS

It is sometimes surprising to think what it takes to make me write after a big lull. This was a simple SMS. The one which Kamal Haasan receives in the movie ‘Azhiyatha Kolangal’ . The message in that movie is from one of his classmates announcing the death of their Indu teacher. And then starts the flashback. A story laden with incidents which are typical of adolescent boys!

Mine wasn’t any different either, only change being this was not a story that had discovery of condoms and stealthy reading of Tamizh porn replete with spelling mistakes and severe lack of imagination. This was announcing the death of KVS , a doyen of Madurai cricket, if one may use the term liberally.

Sundararaja Mama was a typical Iyengar. Big in size, so big that I used to look at the waist size of his pants with awe! And the mandatory hawkish nose of Iyengars making one wonder whether Iyengars alone descended from Garudalwar instead of monkeys and Darwin had it all wrong when it came to us. KVS was always flanked by two of his brothers, both a far cry from what a cricketer he was, but enjoying the patronage of the brother who just breathed cricket.

And KVS himself, didn’t know what kind of a cricketer he was. One day, he used to be a fiery pace bowler defying all the science about the craft and the next day, a beguiling leg spinner who never knew about how much the ball will turn. Or suddenly he will wake up to discover the hardest hitter of cricket ball in the world in him, hell bent on punishing the ball as if it they had an enmity running through generations. I don’t clearly remember any great exploits of him in the cricket field and I may daresay that there weren’t many. Occasions of him winning a match with his bat or ball are very rare, but the rest of the story would probably say why I and maybe a few like me would mourn his death 20 years after we last met him.

KVS had an oil trading business and it would be right to call that as his hobby. His office was MDCA and as a treasurer he would have sunk so much money in the association, so much that had he employed a Texas driller to excavate, atleast one of his vocations would have benefited. Either Oil or Money! He was a man in the middle in a figurative sense running his own set of clubs in between two sworn enemies of Majestic and the TVS group of clubs.

And unlike the other two clubs, his club was a ragtag bunch of cricket enthusiasists plus a few kids like us who had never seen a red color cricket ball. When we saw one it was already some 500 over’s old and blackish-brown in color. None of us had the money to pay for a club however meager it was. But KVS never bothered about money. If he could invest money for an association, sure he can for his own club. So, we all got a chance to practice and play in the late seventies & eighties when matted cricket was a luxury. He liked us all or so I used to think, but then he would have liked anybody who showed a liking to cricket. He was not a coach and if he attempted being one, he would have killed careers. He never believed in techniques and I suspect that he never knew there was one. But what he had was loads of passion to the game and that was infectious.

In a way he used to be a stepping stone for many cricketers, two of them going on to play for India in the senior and U-19 level, but then later shifted one of the two biggies. KVS won’t bother about it. He would either be providing an opportunity for another youngster or busy organizing a felicitation for the two boys who made it big.

I don’t know how old he was when I played with him and how old when he died, it never really mattered. But if someone told me that he died on the field hurling a cricket ball at 120 kph, I would not be surprised. Or handholding a young boy who can’t afford a kit!

May his soul rest in peace and I am sure it would if there was a Cricket Association in Paramapadam and there is a young God wanting to learn cricket.

Death be Damned

It has been a season of deaths. Sometimes it happens that way. 4 years back, I had to contend with deaths of close ones back to back. As if it happened by clockwork precision. It was my closest friend & colleague in January and my ex boss the next month and my dog ( which I hate to call so, but calling it first daughter in this context is so very painful ) in March.

Now it kind of repeats! It started off with Sujatha. And now on a single day Raghuvaran and Arthur C Clarke! The first one was apparently 60. Who knew that? For me when I was 22, he appeared as if he was my contemporary. Much like Shah Rukh ( with whom he even shared a resemblance & of course with Benecio Del Toro ) he started in an amazing TV serial and all of us went around shaving our moustache trying to look like him and ended looking like monkeys. Later he understood Tamizh cinema so very well that he gave necessary doses of overacting in popular movies and went along silently with awesome performances in real good movies. He was in constant search of something starting from liquor, drugs, great love, guitar, divorce and at last spirituality. Just as I was thinking he made it somehow, he just walked off into death.

Arthur C Clarke was another guy! He created that interest in me for sci-fi unlike the others in the world who swore by Asimov. And later moved over to explore the sea, when he candidly realized that there is 3/4th of earth that is still unexplored and he had no business imagining about space. But his story about the notice to destroy Earth by superior aliens to build an inter-galactic highway smartly juxtaposed with our officials doing the same thing for constructing a flyover lives in my heart.

Certain guys really don’t die. They just cease to exist for you to believe that they did.

My homage to these two great entertainers is an ode that follows.


It has this uncanny knack
Of hitting you with shock

Long hands that can reach anywhere
Pauper or king you go nowhere

Makes you think how much you miss
Just when you are sunk in bliss

You dismiss it as no big deal
But bites you with astonishing zeal

You never sit and think about it
But it’s never far, this exit

You think you are racing ahead
Isn’t it always to meet it head to head?

It’s all pervading and powerful
But haven’t it always been sleightful?

Death let it be damned to hell
You just want to yell

When it takes away loved ones
Letting you grieve in tons

Homage to Sujatha

How do you pay homage for a prolific writer who fashioned your thoughts and life in more ways than one? Maybe just attempt writing something yourself, hoping that atleast in such taxing situations, your thoughts and words would not fail you and you can manage to transfer the heaviness in the heart into words! That’s the way I feel now. When I woke up at the news of Sujatha passing away!

Generally news of death doesn’t disturb me much. I religiously read obituaries everyday as if it is an attempt to reassure that anyway people should die. When my father died, though there was a sense of loss, I didn’t manage to cry till I went back to see the empty bed. His physical absence had to be harshly reminded for understanding the loss which is hardly physical. But, now the feeling is strange. Here is a man who has lived for 73 years, and in my life I once managed a glimpse of him in a meeting and later by the good grace of my friend, had a private audience for almost an hour and came out as if I have achieved immortality status myself. The interactions have been just this. But I feel so very heavy and the loss seems to be personal. Truth is that I have interacted with him almost all my adolescent and adult life so far, maybe even more than what I did with my father.

Studying in an Anglo-Indian school where the Tamizh standards are appalling with the liberty of answering in English for Tamizh exam, my initiation to the language which is my mother tongue was pathetic. Didn’t have the current awareness that Tamizh was a great language and I would lose plenty if I didn’t know how to read and write was not much of a scary thought then. Till Sujatha happened!

From the moment I picked my first book of him and till now, the journey of amazement hasn’t stopped. Lately started collecting all his works and he had to confess to me that if I knew one of his works was not available, maybe it never was there. The obsession knew no bounds. Every single work would have been read a minimum of twice, if not more. Even if it was a half page snippet in a weekly which even he cannot remember! So much was his impact.

At this moment I pause to think what made him so special for me. Why do I feel a personal loss now, when I make light of deaths? Why this should haunt me no end and break my inertia to pick up the laptop and start typing first thing in the morning? How well do I know him? Why is it that whatever he wrote was like Veda to me? And why is that I feel that he can never be replaced, though I am certain that anyone who writes Tamizh, even just plain alphabets cannot do without his impact?

I understand that he just didn’t write. He had been a teacher all though my life. It is strange that how much you can learn by reading even plain fiction. His was always intelligent. And if distance education needed a mascot, it was him. Maybe the IGNOU’s of the world should have contracted him to write lessons. The content I have picked from him into making myself had been enormous. About 10 years back when I didn’t know the difference between a TV monitor and a Computer monitor I managed to get myself employed with an ISP. And as it is my wont, I assumed that I am a master of basic Internet in just about 3 months and lectured a couple of colleges. Well, all I had to do was pick his book on Internet and talk what he has written. Started feeling proud of being a Vaishnavite after his books on the subject! So much so that I feel that I know Mahavishnu personally now. Anything he wrote I felt there was something to be learnt in that.

His life was a lesson in terms of time management when I read about his scoffing at folks who ask him how he finds time to write. His life was a lesson in telling you how versatile one can become. His life was a lesson that constantly reminded you that whatever you maybe, you still have scope to learn. His life was a lesson that despite being a hardcore science believer, you can never speak with a certainty of an atheist. His life was a lesson in telling you that you grow young as long as you think young. In more ways than one he has been my guru. I find it strange myself to give so much credit to someone else, but I know inside that it is not a eulogy that comes in the wake of a fresh death. I am certain that I would acknowledge all of this anytime again tomorrow and in the future.

Talking of death, his best was about his own father’s death. I am sure he died a contented man in all respects, but for the yearning to read and write more. Reality sometimes makes you so cruel that you start thinking that why there are so many people who we can afford to let go live and the ones you want to live, go. There ought to be some reason! He wrote that he would want to go to hell when he dies, because he hopes to meet interesting personalities only there and he can’t stand the peace of harmony of heaven for more than an hour. But I know one thing for sure; wherever he choses to stay, that will be heaven for the rest of the folks there.

A stanza from Wordsworth's 'Intimations of Immortality' can very much sum up my thoughts

And O, ye Fountains, Meadows, Hills, and Groves,
Forebode not any severing of our loves!
Yet in my heart of hearts I feel your might;
I only have relinquished one delight
To live beneath your more habitual sway.
I love the Brooks which down their channels fret,
Even more than when I tripped lightly as they;
The innocent brightness of a newborn Day
Is lovely yet;
The clouds that gather round the setting sun
Do take a sober coloring from an eye
That hath kept watch o'er man's mortality;
Another race hath been, and other palms are won.
Thanks to the human heart by which we live,
Thanks to its tenderness, its joys, and fears,
To me the meanest flower that blows can give
Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.

I feel kinda strange and queasy when I dwell more into this. Maybe I just drop the thoughts and pick a couple of his books and read again today.

He will continue to live.